


when i watch the world burn (all i think about is you).

by ftwnhgn



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: (of 33 years!), Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Slow Burn, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 21:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20141998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftwnhgn/pseuds/ftwnhgn
Summary: The sky can't exist without the sun and the moon, just like time needs both of them.In 1921, Hanno has waited for Jonas for a while now. Through time, Noah and The Stranger live alongside each other, their lines crossing in more ways than either man could wish for. Until they don't anymore.





	when i watch the world burn (all i think about is you).

**Author's Note:**

> fuck me if i know who is related to who at this point - i checked the connections several times but this does seem like a less stressful choice of interactions in the show when it comes to that. these two, along with charlotte and agnes, are the most interesting characters in the show for me. also, i am going with the headcanon that agnes isn't noah's / hanno's biological sister but they both obviously grew up together and are part of adam's followers (until, well, canon events take care of that particular thing). 
> 
> edit: this was written before s3 aired and the headcanon about noah and agnes remains in tact in this work of fiction.
> 
> also, obviously not spoiler free in any way! sort of situated between jonas' stay in 1921 and later on when noah and adult jonas meet in modern times. 
> 
> (i am no native speaker and this is unbeta'd - so i am sorry for every mistake or mishap!)
> 
> title: bastille - doom days  
working title: noah got a back tattoo bc of jonas and the show just brushed over it.

_ “Years ago, I was still a little boy; a stranger came to us. He looked as if he'd been in the war. Didn't talk much.  
There was sadness in his eyes - the kind you sometimes see in those who want to die, but life won't let them.”_

_-_

The air smells of incense and dust, something permanently sticking to the insides of the church through the constructions. Sometimes, when Hanno does not think of all that lies ahead of him and all that he is going to live through once he becomes a follower, he wonders if this will ever change or if his church is going to be in this state of chilled dust and incense and wood forever. Maybe it will, Noah seems insistent on recognizing this place like he has not left it for other, finished versions of it, knowing his way around and always popping up out of backrooms and side doors as if on cue. Because he has lived this before, because he knows what his younger self has thought before. The thought is still not sitting exactly right with Hanno, especially considering all the things Noah is _not_ telling him, but he knows he can’t dwell on that either for too long. It is all meant to be that way, of course.

The wood of the church bench feels flimsy under his thighs and he wonders if his older self is ever going to replace them – or if this church is nothing but a means to an end just like the caves. And yet he finds it oddly soothing, maybe having the opportunity of having this for himself, at least. Withheld from anyone else but himself, this sanctuary right at the edge of who he will become and who he used to be. The rest of his life is in these walls, holding stories he has no way to fathom yet, but they feel like a steady companion to his solitude nonetheless. Like something meant for him, the current him, that is unattainable by even Adam or the followers.

There are no lights flickering except a few candles he lit at the altar at the front of the room and his own lantern next to him on the bench, and he takes the quiet of the moment willingly, lets it hook itself into a place in his chest that is his alone as well and that roots him deep into the most untouched parts of him. Where he is no one but himself, no one but a boy sitting in a church and hearing the low blows of the wind across the steeple and the rest of the roof, smelling the burnt incense and the worn traces of dirt on his clothes, focusing on his own heartbeat and the way it thumps in his ears. There is a god, he supposes, in all of this. In his ability to find a moment of peace in the middle of the tearing waves of time and chaos taking him under – a moment where he belongs wholly to himself. And not to Noah or Adam or even Erna. Just to himself.

It could have been minutes or an hour, with him and the wood and the incense and the wind, but at one point Hanno hears a faint creak and thud from behind him and he opens his eyes to the darkened room with something close to disappointment. If it is Noah coming for another conversation stemming from empty air and barely-fed truths he can very well leave from where he came from. As much as Hanno appreciates his presence and his guidance, he can’t refuse to admit how irritatingly half-baked half of what he is doing is. It will obviously make sense at a later date, but everything does. So, Hanno prepares himself to come across as at least some of the stern resemblance his counterpart seems to inherit so effortlessly, only to be met with a completely different person when he looks into the church way behind him.

“Jonas,” he breathes out in one long and rushed exhale, the vowels still sitting heavily on his tongue, his own disbelief at the other’s presence here still enough to betray his nonchalance for the supposed happenings by a fraction. Hairpin-wide only, tiny cracks seeping through his mannerism and face as he knows (even his older self can’t seem to shake his interest in the time traveler and then it would have already been years since this moment) and branding him as someone closer to his age than he usually feels like.

Jonas looks up from where he has been walking careful steps past the rows of benches, as if he hasn’t seen Hanno until he has been addressed by him, and his light eyes still look like a deer’s when he answers with a non-verbal tilt of his head, a question masked in the least unkind thing he can muster in the mess that must be his life now.

It also seems to be that he doesn’t want to say Hanno’s name – not either of the two he has – and it might as well be alright with Hanno. He doesn’t need a name when the traveler’s blue eyes look at him in that particular brand of recognition and unease that seems to be reserved for him alone. Not even Noah, who gets regarded with a different emotion all-together, a distrust and nearly disgust that is unshakably a part of Jonas whenever he comes in contact with the people he has chalked up to be the culprits of his own misery. Well, he will learn soon enough that not most of his prejudice is justified, once Adam puts him on his way as Noah has said. Hanno can only believe in what he has said, knowing that not long and he too will be send on his way.

It unites him and Jonas in their own way. Two travelers, but not yet. Not quite the way they are supposed to at these points in their lives. And wishing to hear himself be recognized par verbatim through Jonas’ voice is a fragment of wishful thinking he learned to not look too far into, it will leave soon enough with the stranger and his pain. And what will be left are the memories of those haunting eyes, sad and yet unyielding to whatever life made him walk through. Hanno already knows it is a look he will never forget, not as long as he lives. The bright blue has become a staple of his closed-eyed pipe dreams ever since his mother brought the stranger up to the room next to his own. Not thinking about him does not seem to be an option anymore. He is a myth come to life, a story Hanno has heard of that is now walking the floorboards in the hallway outside his bedroom door. The remnants of blood around his neck could be Hanno’s, for all he knows he’d take them gladly as long as they’d make him remember. There are no words needed, see, not when he understands perfectly well without them.

It’s all blue with Jonas, his eyes match Hanno’s shirt in the dark of the church.

And time can pass and be walked and crossed and changed, but some moments are infinite. For a split-second Hanno wonders how Noah looks back at this here. What he’s got to say about the strange feeling at the bottom of his stomach, the hook in his chest that is pulling now as Jonas looks down at him from where he’s standing at the opening of the bench Hanno has occupied. No matter what he will become, Jonas will always have been here right now. And neither of them will forget.

He makes room wordlessly, moving down the bench and taking his lantern with him to put it on the free space on his other side while he can hear Jonas sit down gracelessly in the dark. His leg is still bad, he hardly made it through the stone passages and the cave, and Hanno can hear a heavy noise that must be a swallowed down whimper as Jonas’ leg bends to accommodate him in the tiny space between the bench and the plank meant to be kneeled on during prayers.

They are not far apart, only a few inches between their thighs and Hanno knows that if it wouldn’t be for his own lack of care and Jonas’ clumsiness due to his injuries they would probably have more space between them. Maybe Jonas would have remained standing even. Maybe Hanno wouldn’t be here at all, without the feeling of needing to carve out space for himself in a world he has already been promised away from and that crystallizing burn in his stomach ever since Jonas woke up in the room and Hanno talked to him for the first time. Noah has said nothing about that, though it feels important now. _To him_. Jonas doesn’t say anything for a while, minutes and minutes passing with him staring wordlessly into the dimmed candlelight and Hanno shamelessly watching his profile and the way grey shadows pass over his worn-out features. He looks tired for his age, and incredibly old, and Hanno wonders if this is what he will look and feel like once he begins to travel regularly. Or if this is just a singular thing to Jonas.

_(At this point he does not know how every single travel, every page of the book he will acquire, will tear a part out of him and out of Jonas too. That they both will lose more and more of themselves with every jump they make.)_

“That will scar,” Hanno finally says into their mutual silence, his eyes having decided to find a fix-point in the bandages around Jonas’ neck where the red of the healing wounds is still visible and the tips of his hair only brush the white fabric. He remembers when he dressed the wound while Jonas was asleep, patrons talked about him being in a war and just coming back from it without having much recollection of his surroundings. How they found him at the side of the road. Hanno didn’t make much of it, more focused on remembering the boy he was taking care of and trying to make his appearance fit into what he always imagined him to look like. Free of scars, with all of his terror hidden inside of him and only bleeding through in conscious moments. He did not exactly think the stranger would look like he did just come out of the war. The rope burns have been the worst of his injuries, even worse than the bullet wound, and Hanno still couldn’t help but stare at it ever so often, asking himself if it is a reminder of someone’s desperation or their survival.

The longer he knows Jonas he assumes it to be a bit of both. Or neither.

Jonas turns his head to look at him then, eyes searching Hanno’s face for something – what Hanno isn’t sure of – until he follows Hanno’s gaze and tilts his chin to look down at his neck. It is a subconscious movement, but one of his hands goes up to his throat and traces the edges of the bandage lightly as if he can’t believe it is there.

“I guess it will,” he replies, not looking at Hanno as he does.

Hanno’s mouth twists into a rueful smile and he moves closer until their thighs are actually touching, trousers against trousers, and he carefully takes Jonas’ fingers away from his throat and puts them down gently before letting his own hand ghost over specks of blood against the white around Jonas’ throat. “I should have done better. Only so much you can do when someone’s asleep. I’m sorry, I suppose.”

He could put his hand around Jonas’ throat now. The thought comes and vanishes in seconds and Hanno knows it will be another pipe dream.

Jonas doesn’t look at him, instead his gaze is still cast downwards and onto his hand, all while Hanno can’t keep his eyes away from Jonas’ face, memorizing him again in yet another light. This might be the only moment he will ever have to himself fully and even with the other’s presence next to him it feels particularly like his own. Like not even Noah could touch this. He’d only have memories of it, while Hanno is living it.

God has a path for everyone, Hanno has been told this many times before, but as he watches Jonas he can’t believe any god would put someone through what he is going through. All tumult and anguish and doomed weather forecasts wrapped into a single person, as if he was made to carry the burden of a whole crowd. There is nothing righteous in this, in having one suffer for the sake of suffering with no end in sight, and no one to step in to save him. Maybe there needs to be a whole ship built for this strange boy and all his loss and sorrow for him to come out of this life as a less broken person than he has become. Not even time could heal or fix that.

_(Hanno doesn’t know it yet, but he will feel a very similar pain later in his life. He will carry it around with himself the same way the boy next to him does now.)_

Jonas’ voice is quite when he speaks, whispers towards the floor below than acting like he is talking to someone, but Hanno hears him nonetheless, accustomed to the empty silence of the church and recognizing anything that could disturb it that isn’t his own produced sounds or Noah’s. “You’re – you’re so different.”

He doesn’t say to what or whom, but Hanno understand him anyway. It is not like he can’t see it too. Because he may be sinister, but he is not cruel. And he may be determined, but he doesn’t know for what exactly. And he may understand, but he doesn’t know. Not yet. Of course Jonas would notice it.

“Experience changes people. I’m not quite where he is yet,” Hanno explains, his hand now having found a resting place on Jonas shoulder. He is surprised that Jonas hasn’t moved away or flinched under his touch. It could be that he hasn’t even realized that he’s been touched.

Hanno doesn’t mind.

But Jonas looks up now, intelligent eyes searching for something as they look at Hanno again through parted strands of strawberry blond hair – a contrast between the cold tone of his eyes and the reddish hair framing his face and them. As if the world couldn’t decide if he’d be hot or cold, if he’d ever choose a side. He is a walking ambivalence, the soft skin of his face betraying and hiding the harsh lines that he is growing into. Always stuck between two places. He looks like nothing Hanno has ever seen before.

He looks like someone invented him. Not Hanno, but someone. Like something scientific come to life to prove a point. Like something out of an equation or a hypothesis. Or a dream. All of these are the same, smoke and mirrors and untraceable, and Hanno doesn’t know which option satisfies him the most.

“But I’m right here,” he concludes for Jonas anyway.

Jonas furrows his brows then and Hanno can see his hands twitch out of the corner of his eye, as if he is hesitating to reach out or wants to but knows it to be unwise – believes it so. Hanno is not going to tell him what to do (it is not his place yet), but he moves in more again until their faces are nearly lined up perfectly.

If time could stop he’d still prove years later that this would have been one of the instances he felt it. Jonas’ breath ghosts in shallow rasps over the side of his face, but he doesn’t move away and neither does he flinch as Hanno’s hand curls around the side of his neck in a protectiveness he will never repeat for anyone else. Hanno moves forward to close the distance before he can change his mind to do something less unwise or less dooming, the kiss placed more on the corner of Jonas’ mouth than at the center. He can feel Jonas’ exhale now, can feel the tilt of his head ever so slightly, but he moves away before either of them can decide if they want this to happen or not.

Blue eyes stare at him in dazed surprise, probably shock, but for once Hanno doesn’t answer them. Instead he takes the lantern from its place next to him and gets up from the bench. Moving swiftly out of the row, he makes his escape in a parallel line to Jonas’ entrance.

“Wait!” Jonas calls and Hanno only turns around to look at him when he is at the last of the rows, the skittering halt from his quickening steps cushioned by his free hand holding onto the back of a bench. The wood feels only a margin stronger here than it feels under his weight on the bench. Jonas’ lips have been dry and unresistant as he kissed him, only a few seconds in his life, and yet he can feel the moment already giving itself up to belong to somebody else but him. And he can’t have that.

Jonas looks at him from the front of the room, wide and questioning eyes and a tense line to his shoulders that could be constant exhaustion or newly occupied distress. Hanno does not want an answer to that, he wants the burning thing spreading through him from his stomach and up to his chest to move back to where it came from. Or else he is the one who is going to bleed out all of his inner tumult onto his clothes.

His shirt is blue, the same blue of Jonas’ eyes in the half-dark. He won’t ever forget that, he thinks, as he looks at Jonas for another second before he turns around again. He can hear Jonas shout his name as he exits through the church doors into the bristling wind and dark of the night.

* 

Years pass by and he travels, collects pages of the book he has seen the self he is turning into carry around. He doesn’t look it, but he can feel the ache of the burden he has to carry all over his bones and muscles, the sinew holding him together, most of all the beating organ in his chest. For all he knows it could pump patience and purpose through his veins and not blood. He may have left all of it on the grounds of a church in 1921 when he ran away from a strange boy.

He keeps track of every one of Jonas’ movements, sees him grow from afar the same way he does. While he preaches and teaches and gets the task of making a list of suitable children and to finish the church and the bunker in the caves, he knows Jonas is traveling more and more, more than he does, looking for a way to put an end to it.

It could be admirable, how occupied they are with what they believe to be right and true, their determination only matched by their despair. It could be admirable, and Adam makes it sound this way, but Noah does not forget the day the stranger came to his house. He does not forget the haunting colour of a muddied and yet impossibly light blue. Sometimes, when the morning light streams in through the church’s mosaic the same colour traces shapes and patterns into the floorboards. He fixed them once he moved back to Winden, replaced all the rotting and weakened wood with persistent one. Nothing up to chance – and yet it didn’t make the blue disappear. Every morning it would be there to greet him. It could be sacrosanct at this point.

There are children, there are birds, there are televisions and there are horrible things he gets told to do. He has put his collar up to the cold wind blowing through the trees and over the church ground. He only visits the town when he needs to. There are framed pictures of families, family he knows and doesn’t know, and scribbles in the pages of the book he always keeps with himself. There is a girl, a woman, and he doesn’t ever not think about her once he gets to know her. And there are words on his back, ink beneath his skin, and he never not thinks about them either. Both are a part of him, one more than the other. Sometimes he is not sure which is which.

Years pass by and he still is nothing but a boy on a church bench, looking for a way in and not knowing what he needs is a way out and that he has gotten a taste of it once. Years pass by and the wind never changes, neither does the storm inside of him.

He grows up, but maybe it is all wrong. More often than he’d like to admit he wonders how Jonas feels.

* 

When they see each other again, Noah recognizes Jonas by the scar around his neck first and then by the look on his face – the same painful and irritated expression he saw in Jonas’ younger self when he looked at Noah. Noah doesn’t make a point to comment on it, he is fairly certain Jonas knows what he is doing and feeling and more so what he is showcasing of it, and he only leans a little more into the straight stance only a well-established man of God could lean into in the face of walking blasphemy. How sincere or insincere it is is thankfully not the point.

Jonas’ hair is a little longer than it used to be, darker from all his time in the caves and walking through destroyed landscapes and burned down houses, and only a meeting face to face grants Noah the ability of recognizing it and cataloging it as just another change between the then and the now. Unlike his opponent, he looks more put together than ever before. No dirtied or torn clothes, instead pristine uniform of black on black and a wool coat to keep the cold air away from seeping into him like the burden put onto him by the path he chose to walk.

They are opposites now. They were back when they were boys too – burning absolutism and freezing ambivalence – but now it is all the more visible and, even more important, they _both_ can see it now. They can’t ignore it, not like the last time. Not like the past years, when they knew of each other’s existence in a space not meant for the two of them but willfully looked the other way whenever they could have crossed paths.

Some nights it’s all Noah can think about. When he stays up well into the early morning and scrubs metal floors and stone walls and strips himself off anything that marks his acquired profession. Nothing but all the changes he has seen Jonas go through and all the significance of it, how he knows it needs to be this way, and how he sometimes wonders if he could change it. Maybe. Or maybe there is nothing he can change. Only blue eyes and a heartbeat that used to be close to his for a few lonely minutes – pipe dreams. Nothing but pipe dreams.

His existence is a violation of the rules anyway. How fitting he is stringing himself along between one unattainable illusion to another, as if time isn’t cruel enough already. There are people he wants to be saved, who he promised salvation to, and all he can feel himself be rendered to is one minuscule evening he lived through over thirty years ago.

There is no virtuous explanation to it, Noah knows this. And Jonas does too if the way he looks at him is anything to go by.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Jonas grits through his teeth, all brittle and no softness to it at all. He seemingly decided what choice to make, having replaced all the softness in him with steel. Or so it looks like, what he plays out in front of Noah.

Noah only answers in rising one of his brows, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes taking sight of the suitcase in Jonas’ hand. “Going with the apparatus now?”

Jonas huffs out an annoyed sigh, own gaze peering down at the brown suitcase in his hand for a moment before flying back upwards to answer Noah’s curiousity. Noah remembers Jonas never wanting to look at him when they were younger, making a case of never answering any of his looks or only answering when Noah was busy explaining something. But every silent look has been met with weariness and empty space between them, no courtesy of even reaching out a little in return. Over the years Noah began to understand more of what the other man went through at such a young age already, but he still feels sour whenever he thinks back to the days he tended to Jonas’ wounds and questions and got nothing in return. Or nearly nothing. Not enough, certainly.

But no matter what, it would have never been enough.

They are on opposites sides, they could have never been enough. Or what they needed. He knows that now, and he knows Jonas never dwelt on the what-ifs of this lost connection of his past. If what went down between them could be called a connection at all. Maybe for one of them, probably not for both of them. It is enough reason for Noah not to dwell in broad daylight, keeping the constant wait for betrayal something hidden inside his chest where a hole he bled out through used to be.

“Did Tannhaus give it to you or was it Claudia? I could never remember – too busy with other things I suppose,” he adds into the growing silence between them, nearly sneering. Parts of him say he should be kinder, the rest of him tells him he is still too kind for his own good. There is nothing to gain here. He has a purpose now, a calling, and he would not let it be meddled with by the other side.

Jonas doesn’t respond to it either, but Noah takes his silence as confirmation for either of his extended options, only feeling a slight itch of irritation at Jonas’ lack of manners this time around. Another dying vine in the circle of time, there is collateral damage even with the tiniest of things. Jonas seems to be scarred with them, nothing but rotted stems and dried leaves now, and while his face betrays not enough to prove it Noah can see it all over him, in the way he carries himself. Slow and hunched and with a constant temperature of anger to him he knows too well, something that has been festering and growing for years and years now. He may look like he doesn’t care for himself or what is happening to him, but Noah still has learned to know him well enough to know this isn’t true, nothing could be farther from it. Jonas would have died over twenty, even thirty years ago if he could have allowed himself to. But he couldn’t and he can’t, and they both seem to understand that there is so much pain to this knowledge that all he does is tainted with the returning waves of his pain and grief over his own existence that the things he used to keep inside of himself all spill over and onto the outside now.

Noah wants to feel sorry for him, wants to ask God to take care of him, but he knows Jonas does not believe in any of it, doesn’t believe in the Emerald Tablet and its teaching either. And sometimes Noah feels so certain that Jonas doesn’t believe in the power of time either, only in its misgivings and failures. He is not the one to correct him. He doesn’t know if he could do so sincerely. Thankfully, this here isn’t about that either.

There is no reaching out to be made to someone who doesn’t want to be cared for, someone who doesn’t want to be traceable.

“What does it matter to you?” Jonas asks then, head held higher than before. Not like he did when he was younger and did everything in his power to keep himself unassuming and small. He may be a ghost, but he knows his place better than he did before.

Noah shrugs, hiding the echoes of the burning sensation in his chest from bleeding through his shirt. If he’d let it out, it could stain the whole church floor red. Or maybe blue, it’s always all blue with Jonas. He didn’t know back then, but he seems to know now. His clothes are all part of the cold spectrum, blues and greens and grays. If Noah looks long enough, he could find specks of Jonas’ eye colour in the textile. He purposely ignores the idiotic notion and says instead, “I worry. It’s what I do.”

Jonas furrows his brows – a perfect mirror of his younger self. And then shakes his head, a hurtful expression of restrained laughter sitting high and taunt over the skin across his nose and cheeks. He looks like he is in pain. “You don’t. You don’t worry, you _never_ worry. That’s what’s wrong with you. You just do what you think you need to do and don’t care about these children to actually know how to worry. If you’d do, you’d try to put an end to it,” he replies, all the contained anger peeking through the rasp of his voice. Traveling and aging has turned his soft tenor into something fiercer, more desperate. He sounds less like a gospel choir and more like the howling wind pushing past the church’s steeple and the trees surrounding it.

“You wouldn’t know a quarter of the depths of it,” Noah states, as pastoral and yet as personal as he can. This is the closest he will let himself go to acknowledging the thing sitting in his chest, the trapped animal behind his ribcage. “But I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

The strangled laugh ends up as a crooked smile, upside down even, and if Jonas looked angry before he now looks close to furious. “No, you never thought you needed to. Maybe you’re not so different after all.”

For the first time in a long while Noah doesn’t know what to respond to this, the animal in his chest clawing at his ribs and breastbone in feverish desire to be let out. He keeps it under lock with more strain than he’d ever admit – and when Jonas walks past him and out of the church their shoulders brush against each other in something that is neither coincidence or accident but all the more enough of a tangible reality time won’t be able to wash out of Noah’s too precise memory.

The room still smells of incense, after all this time, but he is going to smell the remnants of Jonas on his clothes for days to come. He turns away from the window when he sees Jonas sitting down next to his younger self on a bench in the churchyard.

The yellow rain parker becomes another fix point, but this time only his closed eyes are lingering on it. Time can only do so much to make him forget who it belongs to. It becomes a thorn in all his dreams.

* 

Times dies again and again and restarts the next day, the world’s turning a constant cycle in this little town sheltered by the forests and fields surrounding it. Twenty-four hours are barely an innocent day passing by and days don’t culminate into the long stretches of unassuming rows of numbers. Calendar squares are crossed with red ink, dates written in chalk on stone walls beneath the earth, and two doors turn any other linear passage of time nugatory. Noah has watched it happen, the cycle repeating two times now in his lifetime and him skipping through both of the many intertwined circles in believed preparation of saving himself and everybody else from the repeated suffering this dissembled matter of time instilled into each of them.

Time is not a stream but as chaotic as life itself – how fitting – and he is somehow at the center of it. The sky full of clouds and planets and gravity keeping it all working like the cogs of a machine and he is in the middle of the sky and the machinery, the moon at night and a wheel turning, turning, turning. The world turns and he moves along with it, time dies and begins again and he does the same. Adam wants him to work towards the third cycle, to repeat history again and take the town with them, and the book is nearly back to its full content.

He has a role in all of it, promised for and understood and devoted to, and yet the foundation on which it stands shakes more the closer they come to the end of the second cycle. Adam pushes him and somehow he wants to take a step back and not one forward. He thinks about his family, Elisabeth and their daughter, and what he felt he needed to do to keep them safe. It proved itself to be fruitless, nearly entirely so, and now all he has is more weight pressing down onto him and pushing all the air in his lungs out of him the longer he thinks about it. He thinks about Jonas too, about all his tries to change the course of time and only failing repeatedly.

There is a boat that would need to be built for Jonas to carry all his suffering and all the steel inside of himself to a place where he could lose some of it. This world does not include this kindness, and not even Noah could muster enough mercy to tend to the blueprints of fixing a soul beyond saving or purification. Jonas has grown into his ambivalence more and more, trailing his family’s home like the sun crossing the sky every day, and unable to decide which way to choose when it all seems fixed to happen already. Turning and turning between what is an undeniable destination and a desperate attempt to steer away from it. He is burning with it, all the time, even more than he did before. Noah supposes that losing Martha is still as raw a wound as it used to be when it happened. Maybe more than ever now. He can’t look into Jonas’ mind, but the way he carries himself says enough.

Noah can’t save him either, never could save him at all, and it weights even more than the inevitable loss of his family – because it means that everyone and everything will be lost. That he has been wrong, that the purpose given to him has been nothing more but bait, a hoax, a scheme to get Adam what he wants without actually caring for anybody else. There are cracks in him too now, getting bigger and bigger with the sting of Adam’s betrayal and the already-budding phantom pain of loss, and he knows it will only take a little until the wall he grew into is going to be torn down.

It is truly only a matter of _when_.

When Jonas has appeared desperate before a year ago, Noah himself feels like the tripled equivalent of him now. His solitude maybe the only thing to tether him to any sense of calm and responsibility as of now, making him function enough to make arrangements and preparations for whatever will happen after the end of the current cycle. He meets his daughter, grown up now and yet resembling the child he still calls his own even more now. She has a lot of her mother in her, so much it hurts to look at her, and even something of him – that fierce determination, that blind push to pull through. But the rest is all Elisabeth, all what she inherited despite never being around her mother. And the glimpses of Tannhaus in Charlotte are visible too, when she talks to him she talks to him like Tannhaus did. He knits the memory into closely-woven threads he can hold onto beyond pipe dreams. She may be all that will be left of him soon – hopefully it won’t come to that, but if it will he has to let her know. He lets her know.

He leaves her in all her confused devastation. He doesn’t linger to see what she makes of the photographs. It is not his place.

Elisabeth and him are separated too far now for him to make it to her, but he sends a silent prayer to time or God or whoever is out there that she at least gets their daughter and her mother back. He hopes she can remember his love for what is was – the need to keep her safe always. She deserves to know as much, she deserves to never forget it. He has loved her, fully and willingly and openly. It might be the only pieces of goodness that could remedy him in what is going to come next. It might be the only pieces of him that are going to survive through her.

It is only a matter of _how long_.

_(Somehow, he could always sense the end coming like this. Even when he was young and answered to a different name. He closes the church doors with as much dignity he can muster with what is left of him. Maybe Hanno will understand the hinted sincerity he could give him – maybe this will end different for one of them after all. Maybe he will feel less blue at one point. Or maybe not.)_

He has lost so much of himself to others already. He wonders when there will be an end to it. To a life that isn’t decided by him and that doesn’t belong to him and never has. A life full of rotten guilt. There are no waves to it, it is permanent this time around, a never-ending weight trapping him in place. He may have learned time to not be consistent a long while ago, but this is. He breathes it, and he is going to die with it.

The last thing he does before he goes back is to walk behind the church to the graveyard. He is not surprised when he sees Jonas’ silhouette standing in front of his father’s grave there, only clad in the faded green shirt and dirtied jeans he must have been wearing for days and days ever since he decided to stay in 2020 to fix things. Noah crosses the grass in silent steps until he stops next to the other man, standing close but still far enough apart to not touch each other.

They have met many times over the years, some of them planned and some of them coincidental, but this feels like the end of a long and winding road. Sometimes he worried one of them wouldn’t make it to the end, even when he knew Jonas would by default, and now he knows it is him who won’t cross the line. Who is going to stay in a place beyond where they can reach each other in this timeline. The cycle was always supposed to end this way, but somehow it isn’t consoling him much. Looking at Michael’s grave is like looking at his own, and the sour taste in his mouth is unignorable as he tries to make amends with his fate. It all tastes of betrayal.

And yet he does not feel anger towards Jonas.

“I don’t want you to pity me.” He manages to push the words that have been burning in his throat past his teeth and out into the open, looking over at Jonas in a way that feels like deja-vu. Just like the first time he takes him in with attentive curiousity, knowing it will very likely be his last chance to do so. Jonas’ exhaustion is written over his face so visibly it hurts. It’s the same with his grief, all encompassing and swallowing him down for so long now that there seems to be no reasonable traces of hope for himself inside of him. Noah understands the feeling more than he’s ever let on before.

There is no hope for either of them – not in this world. Not with this sky above their heads.

Jonas turns his head then, answering Noah’s open gaze with his own. Dark blue meeting its lighter counterparts, like waves of the sea crashing against each other. Noah’s hair has grown more reddish over the year while Jonas still seems to succumb to the forces of his travels breaking more and more of the brightness of his appearance down. It is nearly enough for Noah to feel sorry for him.

“I never pitied you. You knew what you wanted and did it.” A breath’s pause, unarguably preparing himself to say something blunt and honest, something Noah knows to be true as well. “Even if it was for all the wrong reasons. All I am is angry at you, for doing what you thought you needed to do. I told you this already.”

Noah doesn’t pry his eyes away, instead he lets them move down to Jonas’ neck, the open display of the wound that has never healed well enough to not be a long line of scar tissue that no one could ever ignore. He does not feel guilt for not having done better with it, but there is a sense of self-disappointment he can’t deny. He hasn’t felt it in a while now. Without the bandages and years to weather the skin it looks only half as bad as it used to, but Noah can remember how it looked when it was fresh and how it felt under his hands as he cleaned it up and dressed it.

Even more how the bandages felt when his fingers traced the material when he kissed Jonas. No, he could never make light of this one evening – it has become the nightingale always singing to him between night and day, connecting the moon and the sun under the same sky irrecoverably.

“We are not free in what we want,” he replies, peering back up at Jonas before turning his head away. It is true, one of the few things he still believes even now. He has never been free in what he wanted. At first, he wanted a purpose and a place to belong. Then he wanted to understand. They made him want to. For years to come he wanted to feel close to a boy he has only barely known and heard more of than he could confirm through conversation with him. He wanted the yearning in him to stop for one day at least. And then all he wanted was to get the work done and to keep his family safe.

And now, now all he wants is to live. But he has no freedom in his desires, so he can’t even entertain that notion. It might be even more impossible to attain than what he wanted when he was still a boy and the sad blue of the ocean followed him into the depths of his dreams.

“No, we aren’t,” Jonas agrees and it is so surprising that Noah turns back to look at him again.

Before he can reply, Jonas leans over to breach the distance between them to kiss Noah. It is a bird sitting in the sky one moment and falling to earth the next. It is the day turning into night in seconds. It is the eternal yearning in his chest that no argument and no purpose and no devotion could kill or put down. Noah’s fingers fly upwards to settle around the side of Jonas’ throat, pulling him a little closer. The angle is uncomfortable and unnecessarily complicated, thigh to thigh and bent torsos towards each other, but Noah’s eyes are closed, and he can feel the tilt of Jonas’ head, his low exhale, and it is the closest thing to time stopping and starting again without it dying that he has ever felt.

Jonas’ hand is on his back, pressing into the black fabric of his coat, and as he moves away after a long moment of lingering warmth the blue in his eyes is impossibly dim. His eyes look the same they looked that night in the church over thirty years ago – as if all the sorrow inside of him can’t fit in his chest so it spills out in the most unfitting moments. He looks surprised by himself and by Noah too, but this time Noah sticks through the ordeal of Jonas’ trial. Whatever is at the end of it can’t be as bad as what is yet to come.

“You’re _so_ different,” Jonas says quietly against the side of Noah’s face, the words ghosting over one cheekbone in a low gust of bristling air.

A rueful smile takes over the pastor’s face, feeling more and less holy at once, and not even the outcome of time could take this moment from him. This is all his, all for himself. He’d lock it away inside of himself right next to the burning pit in his chest and stomach, never to be seen but never to be taken from him.

“But I’m right here, am I not?” he answers, before he takes a step to the side to bring more space between them. The hand on his back falls to curl around his upper arm in a manner of protectiveness he has never seen directed at him by anybody else, or anyone until now. It is a motion of keeping a planet in one’s orbit, gravity holding him down by one scarred hand and the calloused pads of its fingers pressing into him right above his elbow.

“You’re not. You’re – you’re fading.” Jonas’ voice is incredibly quiet, as if he is talking to himself and not voicing a hidden-away worry out loud to Noah. He doesn’t even look at him, the light of his gaze cast downwards to the floor.

Noah can’t hold it against him, not when he can’t even stand to look at himself at this point.

“I guess I am,” he says, his own hand now curling around the one Jonas has on his arm in a swift motion.

Then he steps away and leaves Jonas at his father’s grave, having learned to know when he has overstayed his welcome. He doesn’t turn around to look at Jonas, instead he puts his collar up against the bristling wind and the dimming light of the evening. The fading sun paints the sky the same colour as Jonas’ eyes, that shade of blue Noah could never forget even if he tried. He thinks it will follow him right to the end.

It has always been the matter of how long.

*

Noah got his answer shortly afterwards. He does not look at Adam when he dies, he does not even think of him. Instead he thinks of his daughter and his wife and the never-ending blue of the summer evening sky.

It takes him all the way to the end and beyond.

It hurts unbearably but still less than he thought it would.

The wood under his back is weary, but the room doesn’t smell like incense this time. Instead, it smells like Jonas did when he brushed past Noah in the church years ago – something permanent that has begun to stick to him even when he was on his own.

All of his sorrow doesn’t fit inside of him, he is sure it must be bleeding out through the hole in his chest.

Church bells sing him to sleep, the ones he always heard during mass as a young boy.

*

Hanno knows he is desperate, maybe more desperate than his own fanaticism has ever been before, but he stands in front of Jonas with as much conviction as he can tear out of every muscle and bone in his body, all the sinew holding him together used to push him forward, and he puts his hand around Jonas’ and the gun in it and puts it away from him.

It must be the most intimate thing he has ever done.

He doesn’t care how he looks when he tells Jonas he needs to save all of them, just knows he has to do it, has to say it. Jonas looks as shocked as he did that night in the church, all a deer about to be ravished by a fox, or something even worse. His blue eyes are wide and brimming with fear and denial – and yet Hanno remains unmoved, unflinching in the face of such distress. He is the one who is going to be betrayed, after all.

“_You’re the savior,”_ Hanno says as vehemently as he can and Jonas looks at him like he finally found what he has been looking for the first time they met.

Jonas is crying, all of the fright he has hidden behind so many walls he accumulated finally breaking through. It feels like a victory, Hanno supposes, like he finally earned a moment all for himself again. If there is one thing he believes in, one person, it is Jonas and what is asked of him. He has never failed them. He has never failed him.

There is no ending to this story, even when Jonas flees out of the room with the suitcase in tow. There is no ending to this, even as Hanno stays behind in a house he doesn’t know and without anything left to him but himself.

This is all he is, clad in dimmed blues and strung through with pain that is only growing with everything he does. This is all he is. This is all he will ever be, an undeniable red thread between him and Jonas that has so many ties neither of them could ever finish breaking off. There are traces of a ghost left in his wake, left to haunt Jonas.

Hanno wonders if he will ever hear his name again. Or if he loses it like everything else of himself.

_He is right here_, and then he turns around and isn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on tumblr (georgesezra) to yell about jonas deserving a break and noah having only saved half of his character arc in the last episode(s) or, idk, leave a comment here if you want! I love to chat and I don't bite and I love to hear people's thoughts on this show!
> 
> friendly reminder: you are loved, you are enough and you will achieve great things. you are right just the way you are, a living and breathing thing. keep going.


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